Star Wars Andor S1E5: "The Axe Forgets"

Amusingly, I'd never heard the idiom "the axe forgets, but the tree remembers" before this episode, so I initially thought it was a Star Wars one the writers made up. Heh.


We open on Coruscant, with Douchenozzle being joined for a morose breakfast by his mother. We quickly learn that the previous day's slap-followed-by-tearful-embrace is basically emblematic of the entire Nozzle family dynamic. Passive aggression reigns absolutely supreme among these people, broken up by occasional blossoms of aggressive aggression.

Breakfast conversation goes from her being catty about his posture, to him being catty about her never thinking to come visit him during the years when he actually had something to be confident and preening about, to her being catty at him about his current lack of prospects, to him being catty at her for her strained relationships with their extended family.

There's real love in their relationship, even if it comes coated in barbs. And, to be fair to his mother, she has every reason to be angry and disappointed with him right now, regardless of her immature and unproductive way of showing it. But, the fact that he so organically returns fire in kind definitely makes it seem like they were always just kinda Like This. He also does seem genuinely resentful about her never having come to visit him when he was living on Morlana I, despite his open invitation.

She ends up getting him to agree to let her call in a long-untapped favor from a relative who they both know doesn't like her, trying to get her son some kind of apprenticeship in some kind of trade to rebuild his life from pretty much the ground up. Not like Douchenozzle (or....Cyril? I think I heard his mother call him Cyril. Basically a more polite version of the same name tbh) has any better prospects at this point.

Yeah, I really, really am curious about where the story is going with this guy. Sought out by Dierdre once she finds out someone involved in the Ferrix incident is here on Coruscant, I guess? I'm not sure she'd be interested in Cyril as a field agent, though. You'd think it would just be an interview and maybe a pat on the back and/or small cash reward before she goes off chasing Cassa with her own people. So yeah, I really don't know.

On Aldhani, Cassa wakes up for a morose, socially tense breakfast of his own. The first thing that happens after he opens his eyes is notice that all his equipment is missing, and that one of his new squadmates - a nihilistic, prison-tattoo-covered man by the name of Skeen - is rifling through it. When asked, he tells Cassa that Val instructed him to inspect "Clem's" belongings for bugs and the like, but I'm not sure if Cassa buys it.

Breakfast consists of a horrible-tasting nutrient brew made from local plants and insects. Apparently, it contains all the essential nutrients for human survival, and was developed by the natives in an impressive achievement of folk medicine. Too bad it tastes like shit, would be incredible stuff otherwise. While choking down the broth and trying his best to bond with the pessimistic, overly negative Skeen, Cassa is next approached by a younger rebel named Namek. I said before that the squad ranges from suicidal to fanatical, and Skeen and Namek are pretty much the polar epitomes of that spectrum. Namek has memorized at least six or seven books by Space Engels, and he'll recite it back to you at the absolute slightest provocation.

He isn't just an ideological parrot, though. Namek can clearly synthesize the ideas he's been exposed to, put them in his own words, and glean more from the mixture than the sum of its parts. He also, in accordance to the teachings of Space Bakunin, has become a student of unconventional technologies that the Republic always turned up its nose at and the Empire outright forbids. He's an enthusiastic adopter of the nutrient brew that the others struggle with, and he's also eager to show off some retro handheld sensor tech that he insists to Cassa can bypass the typical countermeasures.

Wait, shouldn't the Namekian be green? And why does NOBODY have antennae?​

Skeen just kinda sits back and mocks everything Namek says.

...

The two faces of armed resistance: the man with nothing to live for, and the man with everything to die for.

It's sort of up to the audience to decide which end Cassian himself is parked closest to. He looks like the former. He sounds like the former. In his exchanges with Luthen, it seemed like he wants to be seen as the former. But the way Cassa comes to life when Namek is revolutionsperging at him, eagerly asking questions and engaging with Namek and seeming to get irritated with Skeen's poo-pooing, I'm not sure if he actually is the former.

Of course, on the subject of things to live and/or die for, we haven't heard a word about that sister of his since the pilot. She was his motivator for getting into the mess that led him here. She must still be on his mind. The story is going to yank on that thread again sooner or later, but at this point I couldn't predict when or to what effect.

...

Once the rest of the group (consisting of leader Val, local tribeswoman Sinta, and...some other guy whose name I didn't catch. Their lizard-on-the-inside Lieutenant Gorn has already gone back to the base to soften up the defenses for them) wakes up, we learn that the team...really should have been a hell of a lot more accepting of "Clem" when he first arrived.

Or rather, they should have never embarked on this mission in the first place until they had someone like him on the team. See, several of them are capable of piloting a starship, but apparently none of them have gotten the cert for taking off and landing on planetary surfaces.

When the entire plan revolves around stealing a ship from a planetary surface and escaping orbit with it in a ten-minute window of time, without being able to rely on sensors for navigation.

-___-

Cassa's expression when he learns about this is pretty much the same as my own.

I, uh, well. I've got to say. These guys have a loooooooong way to go before becoming the organization that destroyed the death star. Pre-Cassian, this operation had just slightly more than one typical human brain's worth of neurons to share, and they packed all of them into Luthen. Who isn't here.

Well, taking off and landing ships stealthily in less-than-ideal conditions is one of the first things we ever saw Cassa do, so he's obviously the thing they've been needing even before getting into his infiltration track record. Not sure why Luthen didn't mention that to either him or Val to begin with, tbh. At any rate, Cassa tells them that he refuses to get on a spaceship with them unless he's the one in the pilot's chair. That's, uh, completely reasonable tbh.

The day develops from there, with Cassa continuing to get along well with Namek, and slowly getting on better with Val and the introverted Sinta. He bounces hard off the other guy, though, and Skeen is just getting on his nerves harder and harder with every passing hour. Mystery guy is just kind of inflexible and overbearing, and Cassa naturally bounces off his personality type. Skeen...is actively unpleasant in the way I already described.

Cassa also demonstrates some new skills that increase most of the others' estimation of him. For instance, his powers of observation and attention to detail. He's already picked up which of the team members are righthanded, lefthanded, or ambidextrous, and when they practice pretending to be soldiers he's able to make formation suggestions based on this. Etc.

Two complications occur throughout the day as they make their way toward the base. First, another air patrol flies by overhead. The group manages to hide all the equipment they were practicing with and make themselves look like a struggling band of natives before it notices them, but apparently they're still too close to the base for comfort. The fighter buzzes them frighteningly close to get the message across.

Well, in some ways that's a good sign. If the pilot thought they were actually anything other than natives wandering a little too close, he'd have either radioed in without letting them know he saw them, or gotten authorization to shoot. But, that said, if they get sighted close to the base for a second time after this warning they're probably going to attract a lot more attention.

The other problem comes from within. Cassa catches Skeen going through his stuff for a second time. And this time, Val herself confronts him about it, in a way that makes Cassa doubt if the last time he did this really was under her instructions.

Cassa starts hanging onto that amulet Luthen gave him extra tight. It's far and away the most valuable thing on him. Potentially valuable enough to lure a more mercenary-leaning squad member like Skeen into rethinking his deathwish.

So, Cassa's probably going to have to kill Skeen when he betrays them during the mission, heh. That, or there'll be some big twist where he turns out to have a totally different agenda of his own that changes the course of the whole story. I'm betting on the first one though.

While all this is going on, Gorn sets about making sure the guards will all be distracted when the infiltrators arrive. Finding stupid custodial work to make them do, cleaning up ornaments ostensibly left nearby by natives (and which he may or may not have planted there himself), having people check on equipment on the far side of the base, etc.

He's pretty natural. Which, I mean, to be fair, these are perfectly mundane orders that a lieutenant would naturally give throughout the course of an average day. He doesn't really have to break character or do anything suspicious, he just needs to do normal officer things in a particular direction.

He also get a hint about Gorn's own motivations for joining the rebels. A decision that he most likely made when he was already a Republic and/or Imperial soldier. During a rooftop conversation with another officer, he makes some disparaging comments about the displaced natives that - without typical imperial presumptions - don't actually sound all that disparaging. "Imagine if we had to deal with thousands of them gather around here instead of just a few hundred," says the other officer. "Yeah," Gorn says, not making eye contact with him, "I can imagine that."

I doubt he has any family history connecting him to these particular tribal castaways. Something else must have happened to give him a positive relationship with them. Or, perhaps, he just comes from a background that lets him understand ethnic displacement from the wrong side, and seeing the same thing happen to yet another group of people is all that it took for him to have his "are we the baddies?" moment. I'm sure we'll learn more soon. I hope Gorn survives this three-episode arc, he seems potentially interesting. Good thing his kind are hard to kill, short of freezing.

That's the first half of the episode. Apart from one, very short, little cutaway back to Coruscant, where we see Mon Mothma's radical centrist husband starting to turn their daughter against her as an attempt to coerce her into abandoning radicalism.

At least, I think that's what's going on in this scene.

It's sort of a weird bit of pacing, honestly. Most of the first half of this episode is one continuous stretch of time on Aldhani, except for this one short interlude sort of in the middle of everything that doesn't create narrative tension or anything. The pacing of this show is generally pretty good, but there have been a few times that the cuts between subplots have felt poorly timed. Either jumping around too quickly, or not quickly enough.


Well, anyway, next half in next post.